JEFFREY GANTZ

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Cary Fukunaga and Mia Wasikowska hold forth Jane Austen has been a movie and television icon for some time now, and yet the Jane that both big and small screens just can't get enough of is the "poor, obscure, plain, little" heroine of Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel.

Its own stamp Aspen Santa Fe Ballet — all of 10 dancers — blew into the Tsai Performance Center last weekend with a Celebrity Series program that included two choreographers — Jirí Kylián and Jorma Elo — who've been Boston Ballet staples of late.

Coolidge Corner Theatre | February 20, 2011 Live opera — at least, live opera from the Met — has been a huge success in movie theaters. (In Boston, the Fenway routinely sells out two screens.) What about not-quite-live dance?

Mary Poppins touches down at the Opera House "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," Julie Andrews sang in Walt Disney's 1964 movie-musical adaptation of Mary Poppins . The medicine in P.L. Travers's original children's stories — eight volumes spanning the years 1934–1988 — was more like a rum punch.

Good Will hunting If you're thinking that Shakespeare never released a greatest-hits play, you've never seen Cymbeline . Then again, that wouldn't put you in a very elite group, since this late (1610 or 1611) romance is one of the Bard's least-produced works.

Symphonie des Dragons, live at First Congregationalist Church Cambridge, January 14, 2011 File this one under "Stuff White People Like": an unheralded early-music ensemble made up of oboes and recorders and bassoons (with theorbo/guitar and percussion) comes to town for its world debut and sells out the house.

American gay Who was Grant Wood? Millions of Americans know him as the artist who painted American Gothic — and that's about it. But since his death, from pancreatic cancer, in 1942, he's become the poster boy for the right and the whipping boy of the left.

America's best-kept secret? Even if the name isn't instantly familiar, the painting will be. You've seen it on billboards, on magazine covers from Mad to Time , in Charles Addams cartoons, on Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live.

Cappella Clausura tames the Devil at the First Lutheran Church on November 12, 2010 Sex and the single (it’s the only one we have) 12th-century opera? That’s what an early-music outfit was promising at the First Lutheran Church of Boston this past Sunday.

Promise of things to come Now that Boston Ballet has settled into the Opera House (after nearly 30 years at the Wang Theatre) and its "Night of Stars" gala has turned five — well, the thrill might not be gone, but the novelty has worn off.